Hi Barry. Thanks for the prompt response. I’ll reply to your points in order.
Just to make things clear, I have been a Christian only half my life. After a childhood of attending a spiritually dead church, I turned my back on it at age 12 and two years later became an atheist, and remained so for the next 20 years. I know all the reasons for being atheist, because I used them all in discussions with my friends and acquaintances. During this time I force-fed myself with information about the sciences and literature. But I always remained open to the possibility that my views might be wrong, and was always open to new information. In the last couple of years of my atheism, I began to see the fallacy in the atheist argument. It was based simply on the idea that God does not exist, and it did not offer any reasonable argument against the non-existence of God. It was simply a claim.
I began a search for God, and in the process found ample evidence for His existence. The only reason I had not seen it before is because I was not looking for it. I threw myself into studying Christianity with the same fervor that I study science, and within three years was asked to teach adult Bible and Christian studies.
I will not try to convince you of the evidence I’ve seen, for there is far too much to tell in this short space, but will address the points of your response in order.
1. “Biography of Beethoven…” This is a red herring argument, which has nothing to do with the topic.
Many of the world’s religions have creation stories that involve a supreme supernatural being who created the Earth. I did not say that “The Bible is true because the Bible says it’s true.” My own statement was not circular reasoning.
2. I am very familiar with the fact that a Jesuit priest, the mathematician and astronomer Georges Lemaitre, who in 1927 was the one to advance the theory that the universe erupted in a cataclysmic explosion and has been expanding outwards ever since. Since the science of astronomy was dominated at the time by atheists, his theory was categorically rejected because his fellow astronomers thought he was advocating creationism. It took 21 years before his theory was finally accepted in 1948, after Edwin Hubble confirmed the Red Shift, which was the inspiration for Lemaitre’s research years earlier. Since then many atheist astronomers continued to fuel the debate for several decades, choosing to reject the Big Bang theory, because it was a Christian who postulated the theory. Genesis Chapter 1 is not simply a lovely piece of literature, but a piece of remarkable insight given that the concept predates modern science by 4000 years, and anticipates the Big Bang theory and the evolution of the universe, even if it not entirely accurate. But we can forgive the ancient storytellers for not getting it entirely right. After all, look at how long it has taken our scientists to develop their theories, and they are still not at all in agreement.
3. “Science of the gaps” is no sillier than the “God of the gaps” argument, and my irony here was intentional, since many anti-theists use the “God of the gaps” argument seriously in their attempts to ridicule Christians, even though very few Christians use that argument. Your statement, “There is no “gap” in not understanding something…”, misses my point that many people believe that although science has not yet found the answer to everything, given time it will. How do we know it will?
4. My point on Laniakea is this; if you have no way of knowing beings on another planet exist at all, how do you know that Jesus never visited that planet as well? You know the answer to your own question? How do you know that the corpus that constitutes Christianity is fiction, and just who are these imaginary beings living elsewhere for whom it has no relevance? Yours is the fiction. How much research have you done into this subject, and what are your sources of evidence to support such a claim?
5. I do not contradict myself about morality. I simply disagree with you because you suggest that all people are given this morality. My point is that no one knew about this standard of morality until God revealed it to us through His chosen spokespeople. Even the ancient Israelites, who received the Law through Moses, failed to live up to God’s morality. They chose to worship the pagan deities of the peoples around them, and therefore their kingdoms were destroyed and the people sent into exile in Mesopotamia. When Jesus arrived and tried to teach the Jews God’s standard of righteousness, only a few accepted His teachings, because His teachings were so radically against our human nature. Even today, not many have truly put His commands and teachings into practice, because they are hard to accept. The English theologian, G.K. Chesterton once said, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been tried and found difficult.”
My point is that morality did not evolve. It is not a universal trait, and even in a supposedly homogeneous culture, such as the United States, where there is still racism and many other discriminatory practices that cause create controversy in “the home of the free.” Morality is as diverse as human cultures, and what is considered right in one culture is repudiated in another. But God’s morality is very slow to take hold amongst our varied cultures, not because it is wrong, but because it is difficult to accept.
6. I did not miss your point about miscarriages: you missed mine. Spontaneous miscarriages are a fact of nature. Many are not even known by the woman who miscarries in the very early stages of pregnancy. Later miscarriages are tragic for those who wanted to carry a child.
This is far different from willful abortion. I am not speaking of those women who require an abortion because their own lives are at risk, or face the heart-wrenching decision to terminate a pregnancy because of economic stresses. I am addressing the vast majority of abortions which are performed in the Western world simply for convenience, as a last resort for birth control.
Who knows that God has placed a soul in each and every blastocyst? Is this your idea or someone else’s?
As to your important reminder; if you really don’t believe that God exists, then why do you waste so much of your time arguing about a non-entity? I certainly didn’t when I was an atheist.
8. How do you know that the description in the Book of Revelation about Hell is utter fiction? How many years have you been studying the topic, to arrive at the conclusion that it is a work of fiction rather than allegory? If some choose to see Hell as a real place of torture, so what? What is that to you, an atheist?
You said that I “write about salvation”. I mentioned salvation not as being saved from Hell, as you have taken it, but being saved from ourselves. When we turn away from our sinful nature, confess our faults, and accept God’s free gift of forgiveness, then we are saved from the life choices we had willfully chosen to follow.
God is not a sociopath in any sense of the definition of the term. We all deserve nothing less than His wrath, not for anything He has done, but for the crimes we have committed against Him. He, on the other hand, has offered us the way back to Him, which we willfully severed, but we must do so on His terms, not ours. Sadly, for many humans, to admit their fault and to come back to God asking for mercy, sticks in their craw, and so many are unwilling to do so. We have only ourselves to blame for our precarious situation.
9. Prove that this is fiction!
10. Have you not kept up with the latest philosophical insights into atheism? It is now being seen by more and more people as a religion, in that it ticks so many of the boxes. Not being a religion does not involve not believing in something (such as Nessie or Sasquatch), but believing in something to the exclusion of other beliefs. To believe that there is no God is to believe in something, not nothing.
Sadly, your closing remarks were disappointing, even though you promised more in your point 3. Who says that atheists are people who are searching for answers? I would say, from my personal experience, that they are searching only for those answers that confirm their personal biases. Those atheists who are truly searching for answers open their minds to things beyond their ken. As the world renown atheist, Antony Flew, stated, he followed the evidence to where it led, and it led him to the realization that there is a God, and that God is most likely the Judeo-Christian God.